Skip to main content

Google celebrates Halloween with interactive Google Doodle

To kick off the Halloween festivities early this year, the Google Doodle for Thursday is an interactive trick-or-treating game. 

The doodle is a “choose your own” type of interactive Halloween adventure, featuring animals associated with the holiday, like tarantulas, bats, owls, and wolves. The Halloween Google Doodle is in partnership with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). 

You get to choose which of the seven doors to enter and choose either trick or treat for the animal that is inside of the door. If you choose trick, the animal will show off some type of hidden talent, but choosing treat gives a fact or two about the animal. 

“Ding dong! Who’s that behind the door? Trick or Treat? The choice is yours,” Google said in its blog post. 

For instance, you can either have a black jaguar shred on a keyboard, or learn that, unlike other cats, they love to swim. 

Google has had an annual Halloween Google Doodle since the search engine’s early days in 1999. They’ve increasingly become more interactive over the years, like last year’s multiplayer Great Ghoul Duel which allowed players from all over the world to play each other one on one. 

Other companies are getting in on the Halloween themes. Snapchat’s map feature within the app has gone dark for the holiday. The map is purple and spooky at night with pumpkins, cats, and candy corns littered around the map. 

Pokémon Go kicked off its annual Halloween event earlier this month with rewards, seasonal items, and costumes for players to enjoy. Any Pokémon you transfer, catch, or hatch will reward you with double candy. This year’s Halloween event also features several iconic Pokémon dressing up as other Pokémon (yes, for real). 

Even NASA got in on the spooky celebrations with the release of “Galaxy of Horrors,” a retro-inspired movie trailer and vintage posters meant to be informative about different exoplanets. The posters showcase that there’s more to exoplanets than finding planets similar to Earth. The exoplanets that harbor treacherous conditions are still equally important discoveries. 

Allison Matyus
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Allison Matyus is a general news reporter at Digital Trends. She covers any and all tech news, including issues around social…
Google Fiber is bringing high-speed internet to five new states
google fiber tv hands on box remote 2

In what is the first significant expansion since pausing new construction in late 2016, Google recently detailed future plans to bring its Fiber internet services to more regions. The company now says it is planning to deliver high-speed internet through Google Fiber to five new states, specifically Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada, and Idaho.

According to Google Fiber's Dinni Jain, Google has been busy the past several years behind the scenes. In a blog post, Jain mentioned the teams have been focusing on the Google Fiber vision and have been looking at refinements to service delivery and products. Jain also said the Google Fiber team traveled across the United States and had conversations with elected officials to bring internet to businesses and residents "as quickly as possible."

Read more
Google’s latest anti-spam change helps clean up your calendar
google calendar tips and tricks feature

Spam is one of the many enemies of the internet, and Google has come up with a new way to tackle it -- at least on your calendar. The search engine giant recently tweaked how events show on Google Calendar so that you'll only be able to display events from senders you know.

With the change, you'll still get email event invitations from unknown senders, but they will only appear in your calendar after you accept. This means that only meetings from people in your same company domain, people in your contacts list, or people you've interacted with before will be added to your calendar automatically. Typically, these are usually trusted people who won't be sending you spam meetings that can mess with your calendar.

Read more
Google says Chrome is now 20% faster on Macs
A MacBook with Google Chrome loaded.

If you feel like Google Chrome is running faster on your Mac, then you're not mistaken. Google recently shared some new statistics behind the web browser, and is claiming that Chrome is now 20% faster on Macs based on the Speedometer benchmark testing.

According to Google's data, Chrome on Mac hit over 360 on Speedometer testing. That comes just three months after the browser became the highest scoring browser on Speedometer, ever with a score of 300. For reference, Goggle tested Chrome on the M1 Max MacBook Pro running macOS 12.3.1, with Chrome version 104.0.5102.0. The browser was the ARM64 native optimized version. The below graph shows the differences between older and newer Chrome versions in scoring, where higher scores are better.

Read more